The present invention is directed to an apparatus for spraying a liquid soap or lubricant composition upon the rim of a vehicle wheel on a mass production basis.
It is quite conventional in the automotive industry to apply a soap or lubricant composition to the rim of a wheel to facilitate the mounting of a tire upon the wheel. Various machines have been developed for soaping wheel rims on a mass production basis, however, for true mass production line use, the soaper must be able to handle several different models or sizes of wheels whose outside diameter, axial width, and center hole diameter will differ from each other over ranges as large as 4 or 5 inches. A set of standard steel wheels for an economy car may be followed through the soaper by a set of optional solid aluminum wheels of substantially greater axial width. This procedure does not allow for any adjustment or resetting of the wheel engaging parts of the soaper to accommodate for dimensional differences and the soaper must thus be capable of accepting and handling wheels having outside diameters, axial widths and center hole openings falling anywhere within pre-selected dimensional ranges.
While this problem has been considered in the prior art, see for example U.S. Pat. No. 4,563,975, the solutions proposed in general leave something to be desired.
The present invention is directed to a wheel soaping apparatus in which wheels of different diameters, falling within a relatively large size range, are automatically self-centered relative to a fixed axis of rotation and in which wheels of axial widths falling within a relatively large size range have the rim which is to be sprayed always located in the same vertical relationship to the soap spray nozzle.